Stanford Hospital staff served Meals of Gratitude

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Lunches from Flea Street Café are ready to be served to frontline health workers at Stanford Hospital. Flea Street owner Jesse Ziff Cool and Holly Tabor, associate professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, started Meals of Gratitude to support healthcare professionals caring for patients during the COVID crisis. (Courtesy photo)

Sometimes those ideas you have in the middle of the night are actually good ones. That’s how Meals of Gratitude, a new charitable effort to help frontline health workers at Stanford Hospital, came about.

It all began with a late-night instant message exchange on March 17 between a well-known local chef and a Stanford employee who saw a need to support healthcare professionals caring for patients during the COVID crisis.

Holly Tabor, associate professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, has long been a fan of Chef Jesse Ziff Cool, local celebrity chef and advocate for a healthy food ecosystem in support of a robust and resilient lifestyle. She has been to every one of Cool’s restaurants over the past 20 years and has collected all Cool’s cookbooks.

“My kids ate at her Cool Cafe at Stanford,” she recalls.

Witnessing the stress her frontline colleagues were facing as the COVID threat became more real, she started thinking about how she could support them and express gratitude for the work they were doing.

“These are my friends and family,” Tabor says. “They are being incredibly brave. While they are serious about doing their jobs, many of them are worried about exposing themselves and their families. We are all thinking about them as this crisis intensifies.”

One evening, Tabor received an email from Flea Street Cafe announcing that the Menlo Park restaurant was transitioning to a takeout-only model for the duration of the “shelter in place” order. She sent Cool a text message suggesting that maybe there was a way Flea Street could help feed the medical staff at Stanford Hospital.

But Cool did, although the chef’s first reaction was, “Are you kidding? We can barely take care of our own!”

But with the Cantor Cool Cafe at Stanford closed, those who had been employed there were now out of work.

“I awakened in the middle of the night and thought, ‘Wait, this could be a wonderful way to employ them,” Cool says.

Cool called Tabor and suggested making lunches for hospital employees, and Meals of Gratitude was born.

“Flea Street had already kick-started dinner to go,” Cool says, “and with Stanford Cool Café closed, we were able to start production in Flea Street’s kitchen at 6 a.m. It is quite beautiful to have them all together. We can also control and maintain the highest level of sanitation.”

Cool is delighted to have a way to keep her employees working during this crisis. When her patrons wanted to step up and buy gift cards for Flea Street to help her out, she insisted that they donate to Meals of Gratitude instead.

The lunch program has changed the way Cool usually structures her staff.

“Another very beautiful notion that has come out of this dire time: We no longer have a FOH (front of house) or BOH (back of house),” Cool says. “We now have what we are calling HOH: Heart of House.

“Every person, no matter what they are doing, is paid the same rate, gets the same kindness and respect for their hard work and has an equal share in any additional generosity,” Cool says in reference to tips.

Generosity is what Tabor knew would resonate with not only her network of contacts but the general public. She hoped she could get them to fund the initial meals for Stanford Hospital workers and then the program’s expansion.

“It had to be tax deductible, and it had to be super simple,” Tabor says. “I wanted it to be point and click. We wanted people to feel comfortable donating any amount they could. A lot of people can only afford $10 or $20, but they are actually giving so much more: $200 and $500, in some cases.”

After a couple of days of discussion and reaching out to her network, which includes many who work in the nonprofit world, she was introduced to the concept of “fiscal sponsorship” through a company called Open Collective. Tabor says they waived the fees to set up the fund, so that all the money goes to the food, delivery and packaging.

“My sister-in-law, Jennifer Beaumont Wilfrid designed the (Meals of Gratitude) logo, and we printed super-cheap labels for the packaging. A friend from graduate school, Jeanne Dechiario, set up our website and our Twitter handle. It was all really organic. “

As of press time, they had received nearly 500 individual donations.

Asked how the first 75 meals were received, Cool says, “Because it is a full meal, we kept hearing that they felt like someone really cared. Our restaurants have been a part of the local community for decades, and I think those who know we are deeply embedded in organic, clean food and supporting local vendors, they felt more of a ‘food hug’ from not just us but anyone who was a part of the ingredients and production.”

“The restaurants are suffering, the frontline workers are sacrificing and the community as a whole is greatly impacted,” Tabor adds. “Everybody is feeling stress. This is something we can all get involved in. It’s really just scratching the surface of a need that is going to last for weeks, perhaps months. Everything is going to look very different going forward.”

Cool also takes the long view. “We would like to keep doing this as long as needed,” says the chef. “We hope there will be no need for Meals of Gratitude at some time in the future.

“Meanwhile, we are hiring our staff and paying them a fair wage. We are paying for all ingredients so we can contribute to keeping our local food chain operative. All of the donations through www.mealsofgratitude.org cover the cost of labor, ingredients, packaging and delivery.”

Jobs with state and city governments are usually a source of stability in the U.S. economy, but the financial devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has forced cuts that will reduce public services — from schools to trash pickup.